David
Lassner
Vice President for Information Technology &
Chief Information OfficerUniversity
of Hawaii

David Lassner was appointed interim
University of Hawai‘i president effective September 1, 2013.

David Lassner serves as the University
of Hawaii's first Vice President for Information Technology and Chief
Information Officer. In that capacity he has been responsible for designing,
implementing and directing a new integrated organization to support academic
computing, administrative computing, distributed learning technologies and
voice, data and video telecommunications. Under his leadership, Information
Technology Services (ITS) provides campuswide technology support for Hawaii's
flagship research university, UH-Manoa, and addresses the statewide needs of
the University of Hawai‘i System, which provides all public higher education in
Hawaii through its 10 campuses and 5 education centers on 6 islands.

Since joining the University of Hawai‘i
in 1977, Lassner has held a series of progressively more responsible technical,
management and executive positions supporting the broad use of information
technologies across the full mission of the university throughout the State.David is also a member of the University's
Cooperating Graduate Faculty and has taught, both in-person and on-line, in the
UH Department of Information & Computer Science, the College of Business
Administration, the School of Communication and the College of Education as
well as at Roosevelt University. Lassner has also served on the faculty
of management institutes for IT leaders nationally and internationally. Prior
to joining the University of Hawai‘i, David worked at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a student programmer on courseware development
teams working with the PLATO system at the Computer-based Education Research
Laboratory.

Lassner plays an active leadership role
in a number of local, national and international organizations. He currently
serves on the Boards of Directors of the Kuali Foundation, the first
community/open source project in higher education to address
administrative information systems, and EDUCAUSE, the premiere organization for
information technology in higher education, where he is a past chair. Lassner
is also a past-chair of the Pacific Telecommunications Council and the WICHE
Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), and has also served on the
board of Internet2 and coordinated a variety of education projects for the
Internet Society internationally. Locally, he has served on the Boards of
Hawai‘i Public Television, the Hawai‘i High Technology Development Corporation
where he chaired the Federal Relations Committee, and he chaired the Hawai‘i
Broadband Task Force. Lassner was recently reappointed to the State of Hawai‘i
Information Technology Steering Committee. Lassner has been recognized for his
contributions by WCET with the Richard Jonsen Award and by Internet2 with the
Richard Rose Award.

Lassner serves as principal investigator
(PI) for Maui High Performance Computing Center and for the Pacific Disaster
Center. He has been an active National Science Foundation PI for almost 20
years, leading projects beginning with the Hawai‘i Education and Research
Network (HERN), a demonstration project to apply networking technologies in K12
and higher education in the 1990s.HERN
was followed by major networking projects to keep Hawai‘i connected to its
national and global counterparts, collaborative international networking
initiatives, and outreach into the Pacific Islands. Lassner is also PI for
several major Department of Commerce projects that are bringing fiber optic
cabling and gigabit speed networks to public schools, public libraries and UH
sites throughout the Hawai‘i and supporting public access to broadband at
public centers on all islands. The extramural funding productivity of Lassner
and his teams at the University of Hawai‘iexceeds $300m.Lassner has
written two book chapters and speaks frequently to local, national and international
audiences.

Lassner holds an AB summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in
economics, and an MS in computer science, both from the University of Illinois
at Urbana–Champaign. He earned a PhD in communication and information sciences
from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and has been recognized as a
Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Hawai‘i.